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I've just finished reading Irvin D. Yalom's Creatures of a Day and I found it be an interesting, helpful, and profound experience. It was a Xmas gift from my friend Valia back in 2017 and, for my shame, it'd taken me that long to getting round to read it. I'm glad I finally did because it was excellent and I don't really regret leaving it so long as, as much by accident as design, there are things going on right now that made it a very apposite time to read it.
I'd never actually heard of Yalom until Valia brought him to my attention. He's an existential psychiatrist inspired by Schopenhauer and Spinoza who works as emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, California whose books, he writes both fiction and non-fiction, include Love's Executioner, The Schopenhauer Cure, and Staring at the Sun:Overcoming the Terror of Death.
The Marcus Aurelius quote at the start of this blog kicks the book off and we're straight into a chapter called The Crooked Cure in which a blocked writer, Paul, inspired by Yalom's 1992 novel, When Nietzsche Wept, approaches Yalom for help. As someone with a keen interest in Nietzsche my curiosity was instantly piqued.
When said client begins by telling Yalom about the doctorate he wrote at Princeton on 'the incompatibility between Nietzsche's ideas on determinism and his espousal of self-transformation' I wondered if I was getting in over my head but, steadied by Yalom's easy conversational style (and my determination to read this book), I soldiered on. It proved worthwhile. The back story Paul (names have been changed for confidentiality purposes) provided rung true and and was peppered with regret, sadness, but also no little anger.
He'd spent sixty years working on a dissertation. He'd been married twice, no kids, and both dissolved quickly but Paul seemed less interested in talking about these events, or even engaging with Yalom's questions, than getting Yalom to read the correspondence (forty five years worth!) he'd saved between himself and a Professor Claude Mueller, a Nietzsche biographer.
Yalom was bemused by what this octogenarian wanted from the consultation and though he enjoyed his company it took him a while to realise that Paul's need was simply a form of validation. He wanted his life's work to be witnessed by somebody he admired. Paul told 'Irv' he'd been helpful but refused to expound before leaving his office, the two men never to meet again. But while Paul had helped Dr Yalom, Dr Yalom himself learnt, or more likely had confirmed, a valuable lesson that day. Sometimes you can help people just by being there, just by listening, just by reminding them they exist.
We live in a large, often dispassionate world and many many people fall between the cracks. Loneliness is increasing exponentially. Our very success as humans is because we're social creatures. We lose that at our peril. I was warmed by this opening chapter and I wondered if Dr Yalom's other clients would provide such touching stories.
They did. Take high flying, but woefully insecure, Charles who, in a chapter called On Being Real, opens up to Yalom about his experiences of losing, first, his father in a yachting tragedy and, later on, his mentor, to what appeared to be a massive stroke. Later expanding his grief to include childhood friends and camp counselors.
Charles, like so many of us, was haunted by death and abandonment. The death of friends and family but also his own inevitable death. He was spooked to the point of agitation by the unbridgeable gap that always exists between two people, how one person could read an intimate situation so differently from the other party, and he sought, hopelessly, to close the gaps and expel his existential despair.
As the book progresses, we listen in on sessions between Dr Yalom and Natasha (a former ballerina from Russia who'd struggled with alcoholism and a lack of 'mothering' and had never got over her first husband Sergei who left her after she got gout and whose face she slashed with a bottle), Alvin (whose long estranged drug addicted brother Jason got back in touch with him just before he died of lung cancer and whose parents both died in a head-on car crash and now was unable to form lasting relationships), Rick (a retired CEO living in Georgia whose fear of losing the spontaneity he's cherished all his life appears to be tied up with his fear of his inevitable, and fast approaching, death), and Sally, a frustrated physics technician who, approaching her sixtieth birthday, wants to change lanes and become a professional writer.
This case convinces Yalom himself to get further therapy (he's undergone seven hundred hours of it in his training) and provides interesting ideas on both how to die at peace with one's self and how to live in peace with one's self, how to be "intimate with the knowledge that life is temporary", and how "it isn't necessary to turn away from thoughts of suffering or death but neither is it necessary to give these thoughts too much time or space". To achieve, I guess, some kind of balance, a form of equilibrium.
In this, and every other, case it seems people's lives are improved by their consultations with 'Irv' but, often, we're not sure why. He offers advice, he has a methodical approach that he mostly sticks to, he asks pertinent questions, he tries to stop people getting off track when they start to feel uncomfortable, and he's not afraid to improvise where circumstances suggest that's the best approach. Most of all, he listens, he is present in the moment, and he makes mental notes. But, even then, not least in the case of Alvin, he's unsure if he's been successful, sometimes not finding out for thirty years, sometimes not finding out at all.
He often gets people to take them through a typical twenty-four hours of their life and then break down why they do what they do, why they think what they think. He had me questioning my own motivations, my own need for validation in the eyes of others, and made me think about what it was I most hoped for in life. Of course, I am still unable to reach a conclusion on this. I probably never will be. Philosophy and psychotherapy are signposts along a road, not destinations in their own rights. It is up to us if we take heed of these pointers or choose to plough on regardless. Professional advice, like any advice, is only any use if we know what to do with it.
There's an Americanness about the way Yalom writes that is so different from the boorish American cliches peddled by Trump and the coterie of bullies and cronies that make up his fragile court. It's an America of Steinbeck novels, baseball games, Chinese checkers, and red-checkered tablecloths. It's an America that remembers the Great Depression, recites the poetry of Emily Dickinson, shops for books in City Lights, and takes summer vacations in the Adirondacks. Yes, it's a powerful, macho America and it's not without its problems but it's also an America that either knows, or at least strives to find out, the difference between right and wrong and to act accordingly.
Reading Yalom's book, I was (like him), "humbled by the endless complexity of the human mind" and touched by how deeply many of us dig to try to understand each other. For me, there's perhaps an over reliance on interpretation of dreams but Yalom makes a great deal of sense when he talks about the way we construct our lives in our minds, the way we construct love in our minds, the way we sometimes refuse to let go of love, the way we sometimes refuse to let go of youth, and the way we conflate the lines between love and youth.
As an octogenarian he writes, and speaks, brilliantly about accepting the dying of the sun, understanding our time on Earth is finite, and accepting, if not embracing, our inevitable deaths. He quotes Schopenhauer but, somehow, without the negativity that particular philosopher is associated with. Along the way his clients describe him as "playful" and "seductive" and that warms them, and me - the reader, to him.
Most/all of his clients are rich, often very rich (though in one instance Yalom does offer to forego payment and go pro bono to help a client), and this is a travesty. A travesty not of Yalom's making but one that applies to not just mental, but all, healthcare in the west and specifically in America. There are extremely capable, incredibly talented people being held back by one issue and because of it they might not be able to find the employment that provides the money so they can get the treatment for it. So they remain stuck. It's a scathing indictment on a capitalist society that worships at the altar of money and has GDP, consumerism, and aspiration as its goals and Gods.
I read this book at a particularly emotional time, one of my oldest, closest, and most loved friends confined to a hospital bed in Reading with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, so it's, perhaps, hardly a surprise that it made me cry. A lot is at the moment. In that I was not unlike many of the book's protagonists (at times I suspected Yalom had struck a product placement deal with Kleenex) but it was the lesser moments, Dr Yalom looking through his filing cabinet of patient records and recalling all the consultations he'd had over a long career for example, that hit hardest.
For what is life if not a series of small events brought together into a mental narrative that forms a greater whole? A random memory here, a snatched conversation there, a cheeky smile when nobody's around, or a tear dripping down one's cheek when listening to a song or reading a book? A book like Creatures of a Day perhaps?
Thanks to Valia for this book and thanks to Leonor for the beautiful homemade bookmark I used to mark my progress ('the light coming through the darkness' reminded me that I/we do make a difference to the lives around us), and thanks to Irvin D. Yalom for writing it. It made me realise that sometimes life can't be explained and though we should always seek answers, quest for truth, we also have to accept the 'knee-knocking terror of the precariousness, indifference and capriciousness of sheer existence'. These approaches don't have to be mutually exclusive but can exist alongside each other symbiotically. I'll endeavour to apply them as I age, (hopefully) mature, and (inevitably) face my own death.
"Swiftly all things are buried in the gulf of eternity" - Marcus Aurelius.
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